Former Soviet citizens in Wehrmacht or other Third Reich organizations or captivity.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

BARBAROSSA POWS

Yugoslavs,
Greeks, and other minor Allies suffered harm commensurate with their
ethnic ranking in the perverse Nazi racial view of Europe, and with the
degree of resistance offered to Nazi occupation of their home countries.
The worst treatment of enemy prisoners, by far, was reserved for
enemies of Germany wearing the uniform of the Red Army. BARBAROSSA saw
the capture of millions of Red Army prisoners, then their deliberate
starvation, massive ill-treatment, and malign neglect by the Wehrmacht.
Out of 5.7 million Red Army men taken prisoner during the war about 3.3
million died in German captivity, most in the first eight months of the
war in the east: 2.8 million of the first 3.5 million captured died, or
10,000 per day over the first seven months of the German–Soviet war.
Some 250,000 were shot outright. Many of the executed were Jews and
Communists pulled out of primitive enclosures for immediate murder.
Ukrainian and Belorussian peasant conscripts were encouraged by German
guards to point out politruks and identify Jews. The selection process
led to several hundred thousand executions by the end of 1941. The rest
were left to huddle together against killing-cold temperatures in
barbed-wire enclosures left open to winter elements, to sleep on frozen
ground without shelter beyond hard-packed snow, and to perish en masse
from hunger and virulent camp epidemics. Starvation was so extensive in
the eastern Dulags and Stalags —POW transit and holding camps,
respectively—that there were outbreaks of cannibalism in some.
Non-Slavic prisoners fared somewhat better than Slavs, mainly because of
spurious Nazi race theories that saw non-Slavs as a higher class of
humans. In addition, the Germans pursued a policy of deliberate
extermination through starvation of most of the Slavic population of
occupied territories. The mass deaths of Soviet military prisoners in
its care was the single greatest war crime of the Wehrmacht, and perhaps
the gravest war crime in all military history: total deaths of helpless
soldiers in German hands was exceeded only by the mass murder of
unarmed Jews.

The Germans generally respected the
Geneva Conventions with regard to Western prisoners, but refused to
honor its provisions concerning Soviet POWs. Among the first experiments
using poison gases to “exterminate” large populations were those
carried out on Red Army prisoners of war. Some German officers worried
that such gross mistreatment of prisoners in the east would have
negative military consequences. And so it did: Red Army men fought
increasingly desperately, often to the death, once they learned what
surrender and German captivity really meant. By mid-1942 the Germans
also realized that Soviet prisoners represented a huge pool of potential
forced laborers. Therefore, even after the worst excesses of malign
neglect over the winter of 1941–1942 stopped, more prisoners were worked
to death as slaves. Altogether, about 55 percent of all krasnoarmeets
taken prisoner from 1941 to 1945 died in German hands. As German
casualties mounted in the east through 1943 the Wehrmacht looked to
recruit low-grade military replacements and frontline workers among
anti-Soviet prisoners. Men agreed to serve as “ Hiwi ” (Hilfswilliger)
in return for food and shelter, or to join so-called “legions” of
Baltic, Cossack, Georgian, or Turkmen fighters as Osttruppen, or to
serve with the Waffen-SS. Until the great military reverses of 1943, Red
Army prisoners were kept near the German front lines. By the end of the
war, over half were no longer crammed into Stalags but worked on German
farms, in mines or factories, or served as Hiwis with Wehrmacht units.
During 1944–1945 German treatment of POWs improved as larger numbers of
Landser were captured by the Red Army, and fear of reprisal mounted
within the Wehrmacht as defeat clearly loomed in the east.

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About Me

Mitch Williamson is a technical writer with an
interest in military and naval affairs. He has published articles in
Cross & Cockade International and Wartime magazines. He was
research associate for the Bio-history Cross in the Sky, a book about
Charles 'Moth' Eaton's career, in collaboration with the flier's son,
Dr Charles S. Eaton. He also assisted in picture research for John
Burton's Fortnight of Infamy.
Mitch is now publishing on the WWW various specialist websites combined
with custom website design work.